Federal prisoner sentenced to death

Published: Saturday, May 27, 2000

HOUSTON {AP} A federal judge Friday set an Aug. 5 execution date for convicted killer Juan Raul Garza, an accused marijuana smuggler who would become the first federal prisoner put to death in almost four decades.

Mervyn Mossbacker Jr., the Houston-based U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, had sought a middle-of-the-week execution date rather than a weekend day "to provide the greatest flexibility with respect to ensuring that appropriate staffing is available to carry out the execution and provide adequate security."

But in an order signed Friday, U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela in Brownsville set the date for Aug. 5, a Saturday. The lethal injection would be at 6 a.m.

The federal death chamber is at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

"The Bureau of Prisons has been informed," spokesman Scott Wolfson in Washington said. "What is happening now is the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons is making the appropriate notifications, going through the appropriate steps, notifying the appropriate parties."

Justice Department officials also are giving a final review to a draft of a detailed technical manual governing the manner and means of carrying out the execution itself, Mossbacker said in a motion this week to the court.

"The government seeks to ensure that this first execution, and those that follow, will be carried out in an appropriate, dignified and expeditious manner," he said.

The last federal execution was in 1963. In 1972, The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty had been unfairly applied. State and federal procedures were revised and the high court restored the death penalty on the federal level in 1988, more than a decade after states resumed the punishment.

At the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Garza is among the 20 inmates awaiting execution. Among his death row colleagues is Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others five years ago.

Garza, 43, was convicted in Brownsville in August 1993 on federal charges in the murders of three men between April 1990 and January 1991. A 10-count indictment named him as the boss of a drug ring that imported tons of marijuana into the United States between 1983 and 1993. Prosecutors sought the death penalty under a 1988 "kingpin" law.

While the indictment accused him specifically of three murders, prosecutors presented testimony that he ordered or carried out five more killings, four of them in Mexico. Among the victims, prosecutors said, was Garza's son-in-law.

Garza, who was held on Texas death row following his conviction until his transfer to the new federal death row in Indiana, denied any involvement in gangs, drugs or murders.

"I didn't kill any of these people," he told The Associated Press in a 1994 interview while on death row in Texas. "I'm not responsible... I got the shaft."